Page:Old and New London, vol. 2.djvu/28

OLD AND NEW LONDON.

[London Bridge. before is really, as Gough, in his "Sepulchral Monuments," says most of such figures are, the work of the fifteenth century. Now the real Audery, if he lived at all, lived long before the Conquest, for the first wooden bridge was, it is thought, probably built to stop the Danish pirate-vessels.

The first wooden bridge was destroyed by a terrific flood and storm, mentioned in the "Chronicle of Florence of Worcester," which, in the year 1090, blew down six hundred London houses, and lifted the roof off Bow Church. In the second year of Stephen a fire, that swept away all the wooden houses of London from Aldgate to St. Paul's, destroyed the second wooden bridge.

The first London Bridge of stone was begun in 1176, by Peter, a priest and chaplain of St. Mary Colechurch, a building which, till the Great Fire made short work of it, stood in Conyhoop Lane, on the north side of the Poultry. There long existed a senseless tradition that pious Peter of the Poultry reared the arches of his bridge upon wool-packs; the fact, perhaps, being that Henry II. generously gave towards the building a new tax levied upon his subjects' wool. Peter's bridge, which occupied thirty-three years in its construction, boasted nineteen pointed stone arches, and was 926 feet long, and 40 feet wide. It included a wooden drawbridge, and the piers were raised upon platforms (called starlings) of strong elm piles, covered by thick planks bolted together, that impeded the passage of barges. In one of the piers was erected a two-storeyed chapel, forty feet high and sixty feet long, to St. Thomas a Becket. The lower chapel could be entered either from the chapel above or from the river, by a flight of stone stairs. The founder himself was buried under the chapel staircase. Peter's bridge was partly destroyed by a great fire in 1212, four years after it was finished, and while its stones were still sharp and white. There were even then houses upon it, and gate-towers; and many people crowding to help, or to see the sight, got wedged in between two fires by a shifting of the wind, and being unable to escape, some three thousand were either burnt or drowned.

King John, after this, granted certain tolls, levied on foreign merchants, towards the bridge repairs. Henry III., according to a patent-roll dated from Portsmouth, 1252, permitted certain monks, called the Brethren of London Bridge, with his especial sanction, to travel over England and collect alms. In this same reign (1263) the bridge became the scene of great scorn and insult, shown by the turbulent citizens to Henry's queen, Eleanor of Provence, who was opposed to the people's friends, the barons, who were still contending for the final settlement of Magna Charta. As the queen and her ladies, in their gilded barge, were on their way to Windsor, and preparing to shoot the dangerous bridge, the rabble above assailed her with shouts and reproaches, and casting heavy stones and mud into her boat, at her and her bright-clothed maidens, drove them back to the Tower, where the king was garrisoned. Towards the end of the same year, when Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, marched on London, the king and his forces occupied Southwark, and, to thwart the citizens, locked up the bridge-gates, and threw the ponderous keys into the Thames. But no locks can bar out Fate. The gates were broken open by a flood of citizens, the king was driven back, and Simon entered London. After the battle of Evesham, where the great earl fell, the king, perhaps remembering old grudges, took the half-ruinous bridge into his own hands and delivered it over to the queen, who sadly neglected it. There were great complaints of this neglect in the reign of Edward I., and again the Holy Brothers went forth to collect alms throughout the land. The king gave lands also for the support of the bridge—namely, near the Mansion House, Old Change, and Ivy Lane. He also appointed tolls—every man on foot, with merchandise, to pay one farthing; every horseman, one penny; every pack carried on horseback, one halfpenny. This same year (1281) four arches of London Bridge were carried away by the same thaw-flood that destroyed Rochester Bridge.

The reign of Edward I. was disgraced by the cruel revenge taken by the warlike monarch on William Wallace. In August, 1305, on Edward's return from the fourth invasion of Scotland, "this man of Belial," as Matthew of Westminster calls Wallace, was drawn on a sledge to Smithfield, there hanged, disembowelled, beheaded, quartered, and his head set on a pole on London Bridge. An old ballad in the Harleian Collection, describing the execution of Simon Eraser, another Scotch guerilla leader, in the following year, concludes thus

The heads of these two Scotch patriots were, no doubt, placed side by side on the gate at the north or London end of the bridge.

The troublous reign of the young profligate, Richard II., brought more fighting to the bridge, for